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Adding a document to what I’ll call my Gross! WHY?! file, an airline passenger put his bare feet on the TV screen at his seat. Unfortunately for him (and for us, too, maybe?) one of the other passengers was comedian Andy Richter, whom you might know as Conan O’Brian’s sidekick. He decided to tweet about it:

Break basic airplane etiquette around comedian Andy Richter at your peril. [He] used Twitter to publicly shame a fellow passenger who repeatedly placed his bare feet on the seatback TV screen in front of him.

Richter explained in a series of tweets how he first “snitched this f-cker out to the flight attendant.” He then asked the man to put his feet down. “When he just put them back up I decided f-ck it, I’m tweeting,” he explained.

The man ended up leaving “dirty toe smudges” on the screen,” Richter wrote.

[From HuffPo]

You can read Andy’s first (NSFW) tweet here, but here are two of the later ones:

The flight attendant came back right before we got off and asked him to take them down again. Guy did and asked “is that like a just-when-taxiing thing?” Attendant: “no, it’s a basic airplane courtesy thing.” Guy seemed surprised to hear that

— Andy Richter (@AndyRichter) August 19, 2019

The flight attendant came back right before we got off and asked him to take them down again. Guy did and asked “is that like a just-when-taxiing thing?” Attendant: “no, it’s a basic airplane courtesy thing.” Guy seemed surprised to hear that

— Andy Richter (@AndyRichter) August 19, 2019

Mark Hamill and Wajahat Ali were among those who praised Andy:

Keep fighting the good fight, Andy! ?

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) August 19, 2019

Andy, you’re the hero America needs but doesn’t deserve.

— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) August 19, 2019

HuffPo notes that in addition to accolades, Andy was the recipient of people’s similar stories of outrageous breaches of etiquette and common sense:

That’s my favorite, people being shocked that the socially unacceptable thing they’re doing is unacceptable. I was at a show last week and this dude was filming EVERY song with his phone. Politely asked him to put it down, he seemed surprised I said so…

— Dylan Lee (@DylanChristopha) August 19, 2019

I’ve been a flight attendant for 31 years. If you find this behavior revolting, you cannot imagine how much worse people can get. @AndyRichter, if you ever want to write comedy based on commercial flights, please, please let me be a consultant on your project. I’ve got stories.

— Bertfa (@BertTraveler) August 19, 2019

Meanwhile up in first… pic.twitter.com/8bP62ESWlf

— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) August 19, 2019

Ugh. One of the most stunning parts of this is the man’s response to the flight attendant, confused that this behavior is a problem. When has he ever heard anybody say anything involving the position of passengers’ feet while taxiing? Maybe he’s never flown before? (I’m serious, because I’m trying to understand why he’d think this would be OK.) I understand needing and wanting to stretch, but you’re supposed to get up and walk around! If you’re not on the aisle, politely ask whomever to let you by and then walk up and down the aisle a couple of times. And…I doubt those screens are wiped down regularly, if at all. Who knows what germs are on them?! Why would you want the screen to come into contact with your bare feet in the first place? With all the flying I’ve done, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that out-of-line etiquette-wise. I thought that the strangest story I’d read about an airplane this summer was the one about the flight attendant who hid in an overhead bin. I was wrong.

Here’s the image and you can

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Hey @k.schaal Look how sharply I was dressed in rehearsal today

A post shared by Andy Richter (@richtercommaandy) on May 6, 2019 at 8:06pm PDT

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